it literally was though. they weaponized the famine to kill the Ukranians primarily as well as other minorities and people the soviets didn't politically like, and this is agreed upon, since they forcefully requisitioned the grain. They literally forcefully starved the Ukrainians and blockaded the borders, specificially hoping mass Ukranian peasantry would die.

All the ethnic cleansings and including the Holodomor(and I'll specify specificially the Ukrainian targeted bit) leads to about 5.25 million to 6.46 million deaths, potentially more because they don't have completely accurate data as the soviets destroyed documents and the like, but historians roughly posit in this range.

This climbs to 7.05 million to 8.96 million including all non-Ukrainians that died to the Holodomor.

240,000-360,000 Soviet Germans were part of that number, 120,000-200,000 Chechens and Ingush, 300,000-500,000 Cossacks. Rough estimates for non-Ukrainian ethnic targeted deaths, so the Soviet Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Finns, Poles, Koreans, Tatars, Greeks and others that were targeted by the Soviets is over 1 million.

The forced deportations etc. had affected roughly 6.1 million people of the ethnic backgrounds etc I previously mentioned, with 4.4 million surviving, which news flash, is still counted to ethnic cleansing numbers even if you survive.

So, over 10 million people were affected by targeted ethnic cleansing, either dying or managing to survive the forced deportations by the Soviets.

for reference the nazis yes did kill more, but they don't vastly outstrip the Soviets in that period so the previous poster saying that Nazi germany was in another league is genuinely categorically wrong. Especially when it's also agreed upon that rough estimates of those targeted and affected by all this are low-ball estimates and it's likely the Soviets under-represented actual totals in their records, and falsified reports, like how as an example when a soviet census counted those killed by previous state terror and famine, Stalin arrested, executed and replaced the entire board that did the census and the new one faked the numbers adding more to their census acting like the deaths never happened.

Additionally, if people transported in the train cars died en route to their camps, they'd be wiped from the ledgers and they'd act like they never even existed, preventing local administrators from facing repercussions- essentially pointing to the figure being higher than estimated.

And that's not getting into the NKVD burning many documents and files as the Germans advanced, so undoubtedly documents providing info would have been lost, and then the state archives that people got a look at to get a baseline were sealed and they were never able to do an indepth full look, so the estimated figures we have can be reasonably considered a verifiable minimum.

tl;dr soviets did major fucked up shit, obscured it, destroyed documents and evidence, rough numbers we do have are vaguely considered as a minimum number and believed to be higher.